Google Cross Device Tracking and Audio Watermarks

Advertising on the Web is going through some changes because of how smart phones and tablets track visitors on a site, and how advertisements may broadcast high-frequency sounds that may act as audio watermarks that other devices can pick up upon. Imagine watching TV, and your TV broadcasts a high-frequency sound from an advertisement that your phone hears, and shares with the advertiser, who may then track whether you search for or purchase the product offered on a web site?

In November, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a workshop on Cross Device Tracking, where they investigated practices that different companies were getting involved with, and they did some diving into the topic in a very informative way. There are a couple of videos linked to from that page that are worth watching if you want to become better informed on the topic.

I noticed a couple of recent patent filings at Google that were relevant to the workshop and to that article that fit into these changes, and are worth thinking about:

The first of these considers some of the different types of devices that are quickly growing in usage across the Web, such as smart phones and tablets, that don’t use browsers that save cookie files, and aren’t tracked from that type of approach as these Web users travel across the Web. Instead, these devices often use an Advertising ID, or other means of tracking behavior from one device and sharing that tracking with other devices.

Techniques for cross-device notifications are provided. An example method includes receiving a first indication of an event detected at a first device associated with a user account, determining one or more characteristics of the event based on the first indication of the event, detecting whether the determined characteristics match at least one selection criterion, automatically identifying a second device from one or more devices associated with the user account, and providing, if the determined characteristics match the at least one selection criterion, the first indication of the event to the second device associated with the user account, where the provided first indication of the event is displayed at the second device to allow management of the event at the first device from the second device.

This second approach, involving high-frequency sounds that you wouldn’t even hear, surprised me. The patent itself doesn’t talk about that kind of tracking itself. But, it does share information about what you’ve been subjected to (a particular advertisement) so that your future activities involving that advertisement might then be tracked.

A client device encodes data into an audio signal and communicates the audio data to an additional client device, which decodes the data from the audio signal. The data is partitioned into characters, which are subsequently partitioned into a plurality of sub-characters. Each sub- character is encoded into a frequency, and multiple frequencies that encode sub-characters are combined by the client device to generate an audio signal. Frequencies encoding sub -characters may be above 16 kilohertz, so the sub-characters are transmitted using frequencies that are inaudible to humans. The audio signal is communicated to an additional client device, which decodes frequencies from the audio signal to sub-characters, which are then combined into characters by the additional client device to generate the data.

The future of advertising and tracking advertisements on the Web will involve multiple types of devices, and may also involve the use of high pitched frequencies that are outside of the range of normal hearing by human beings. Google now has patent filings that describe their possible use of this kind of technology.

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I’m not sure how useful the audio watermark feature will be in future – particularly if the tones are only associated with adverts. All that would prove is that your *phone* was subjected to the advertisement.

I suppose this means we can expect to see audio product placement from programme sponsors in future…

It would tell the device that recorded the watermark when you may have heard the advertisement, enabling it to track your activities after you listened to the advertisement.So, it would be tracking your activities along with the fact that the phone noticed the audio watermark. Other audio watermarks could be associated with particular movies or television shows or songs, so they could track whether or not you purchased merchandise that might be associated with that media. I’ve written about Google tracking a media consumption history as described in Google patents, and Google could collect watermark information about different media that you’ve experienced (http://www.seobythesea.com/2015/02/google-media-consumption-history-patent-filed/) to keep a record of that information.

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This does not surprise me at all. Google has to be seen as being at the forefront of search engine technology or Bing or one of the others would suddenly creep up to take a bigger share.

Using audio technology is very feasible and I can see how it would work. This does goes to show that in this game, if you don’t keep up to date (on a near daily basis) with the latest Google technology and patents, you will soon be left behind.

There are enough other companies involved in crosff device tracking and audio watermarking that it would be surprising if Google didn’t also get involved. You’re right about paying attention to changes in the industry, because they happen so quickly.

Those messages aren’t for you though, Justin. They are to alert your phone that you’ve been subjected to a particular ad, so that your actions can be further tracked. I just noticed an interesting and thoughtful article on this topic:

This was the first time I had seen patents from Google on the topics of cross device tracking and audio watermarking. So, there aren’t a lot of indications that Google has done much with this type of algorithm in the past, nor do they have much of a record in changing what they have been doing for these things.

Thank you. Google has been telling us for the last couple of years that they have been performing tens of thousands of experiments each year, and they’ve admitted publicly to at least 500 changes to Google’s core ranking algorithms (what ever they might actually mean by that phrase) each year. So I expect there to be a change to Google’s algorithm every week, on the average.

“Imagine watching TV, and your TV broadcasts a high-frequency sound from an advertisement that your phone hears, and shares with the advertiser, who may then track whether you search for or purchase the product offered on a web site?”

Damn, targeted advertising is about to get weird, lol. Not necessarily bad, though – personally I’m always impressed whenever I see an ad from an advertiser who somehow managed to target me really accurately (that is, I have at least an iota of genuine interest in whatever they’re selling).

Hi Bill,
I don’t fully understand how that will work, and potentially you do not either, but it is worth asking: How do these devices communicate with another? Is it the software or the hardware that is doing the communicating? Perhaps I missed the answer to this because I was partially lost, the idea is so far beyond anything I could have imagined. Thanks so much for the post, very interesting info.

If you log into a website using your web browser on your desktop computer, and then if you log into the website on a mobile device, you’ve let the site know that you are the same person on both devices. It’s possible that both devices might learn of your identity from the collection of data by a lot of websites. Check out this article for a look at how that may be done:

I fell over this article by accident and was…. let´s say a little bit scared about what that could mean for our society. Mmmmhh… everybody would be even more transparent than now. The imagination is somehow creepy, I guess.

Of course, I understand it will come with benefits in everyday life. But thinking about, that my TV will “talk” to my laptop in high-frequency sounds. Or my tablet to my smartphone and so on.

Interesting article.. this application clearly illustrates that future is driven by IoT like late 90’s is ruled by web etc. but I really couldn’t predict how many years it would take for this technology to be used widely by many companies considering most of the companies still couldn’t even master analytics space

The FTC did have a workshop on cross device tracking in November, so it’s possible that they could provide some guidelines that may help define how such technology should be used in the future. It is possible that technologies of this type may end up becoming very popular as mobile devices remain popular ways that more and more people get connected to the Web through.

God damn you Bill and your knowledge bombs I was just recovering from the last few resources you shared last time I was here about Microsoft’s report and how Google and others were exploring search intent for name entity queries, This one however is one to watch, it’s also interesting if you visit wikipedia for a search on Googles list of products where you see a request, as always Bill while I might not fully grasp the concepts fully it’s always enlightening to drop by cheers

Hi Bill ,
Thanks for the information . I currently know about this technology what google work on that .
Audio watermarking and cross device tracking hopefully will be counted as good algorithm in future.
Interesting Article I must say… well done

It’s scary what Google is doing should this ever come to pass. Frequencies that we can’t even hear? They’re going to be freaking out dog and cat owners I imagine. It’s enough with their Penguin update already now I came across this. What’s next with Google. I wonder what it will look like in 10 years from now.